D.1 From Brian Reid

One day in 1983 I got the flu and had to stay home from work for three
days with nothing to do. I used that time to write MHE. The
fundamental idea behind MHE was that it was a “puppeteer” driving
the MH programs underneath it. MH had a model that the editor was
supposed to run as a sub-process of the mailer, which seemed to me at
the time to be the tail wagging the dog. So I turned it around and
made the editor drive the MH programs. I made sure that the UCI people
(who were maintaining MH at the time) took in my changes and made them
stick.

Today, I still use my own version of MHE because I don't at all like
the way that GNU MH-E works and I've never gotten to be good enough at
hacking Emacs Lisp to make GNU MH-E do what I want. The Gosling-emacs
version of MHE and the GNU Emacs version of MH-E have almost nothing
in common except similar names. They work differently, have different
conceptual models, and have different key bindings1.

Brian Reid, June 1994

Footnotes

[1] After
reading this article, I questioned Brian about his version of MHE, and
received some great ideas for improving MH-E such as a dired-like
method of selecting folders; and removing the prompting when sending
mail, filling in the blanks in the draft buffer instead. I passed them
on to Stephen Gildea, the current maintainer, and he was excited about
the ideas as well. Perhaps one day, MH-E will again resemble MHE
(draft form editing was introduced in version 7.4).